eply as this: Cristel had surprised
me. To begin with, her father was "well-connected," as we say in England.
His younger brother had made a fortune in commerce, and had vainly
offered him the means of retiring from the mill with a sufficient income.
Then again, Giles Toller was known to have saved money. His domestic
expenses made no heavy demand on his purse; his German wife (whose
Christian name was now borne by his daughter) had died long since; his
sons were no burden on him; they had never lived at the mill in my
remembrance. With all these reasons against his taking a stranger into
his house, he had nevertheless, if my interpretation of Cristel's answer
was the right one, let his spare rooms to a lodger. "Mr. Toller can't
possibly be in want of money," I said.

"The more money father has, the more he wants. That's the reason," she
added bitterly, "why he asked for plenty of room when the cottage was
built, and why we have got a lodger."

"Is the lodger a gentleman?"

"I don't know. Is a man a gentleman, if he keeps a servant? Oh, don't
trouble to think about it, sir! It isn't worth thinking about."

This was plain speaking at last. "You don't seem to like the lodger," I
said.

"I hate him!"

"Why?"

She turned on me with a look of angry amazement--not undeserved, I must
own, on my part--which showed her dark beauty in the perfection of its
luster and its power. To my eyes she was at the moment irresistibly
charming. I daresay I was blind to the defects in her face. My good
German tutor used to lament that there was too much of my boyhood still
left in me. Honestly admiring her, I let my favorable opinion express
itself a little too plainly. "What a splendid creature you are!" I burst
out. Cristel did her duty to herself and to me; she passed over my little
explosion of nonsense without taking the smallest notice of it.

"Master Gerard," she began--and checked herself. "Please to excuse me,
sir; you have set my head running on old times. What I want to say is:
you were not so inquisitive when you were a young gentleman in short
jackets. Please behave as you used to behave then, and don't say anything
more about our lodger. I hate him because I hate him. There!"

Ignorant as I was of the natures of women, I understood her at last.
Cristel's opinion of the lodger was evidently the exact opposite of the
lodger's opinion of Cristel. When I add that this discovery did decidedly
operate as a relief to my mind